Ashes....

I have always been a firm believer that it takes a community to raise a child....there is simply now way in our day and age for any set of parents to have all the life experiences to be equipped to handle everything that our children will come in contact with and experience....and in these times we can often feel alone and confused, and perhaps even feel like we are out of our own minds, when actually we are not. With technology and our current situation in the world I find, as have many others, that our children are exposed to far more and at a younger age than we ourselves were exposed or encountered similar situations, therefore, we find ourselves at a loss when things do not go as we, as parents, have planned and we find ourselves in uncharted territory.....but all is not lost. I am so glad that I was able to help a friend today understand the feelings of her own child, who she was struggling to understand through the "ashes" of my own childhood, or adolescence to be exact. I call them "ashes" because they are burning feelings that had at that time in my life and they worked themselves out and cooled and are now are gone. And I am so glad that I was able to do this, because he simply is a delightful young man, who probably has difficulty even understanding what he himself is feeling, and therefore has difficulty expressing his thoughts appropriately, and acts out because of this....I know that anger, I went through a similar situation when I was about the same age....and I said the same things he did to his mom and acted in much the same way. I wonder if my mom felt as crazy and helpless as his mom did as I know that my mom probably had no one that had gone through the same thing that could help her understand what I was feeling, even though I couldn't even explain why I felt the way I did in that situation. As parents, we all know that there is no "manual" that can tell us how to fix everything, why our kids do and act the way they do. It doesn't help that every child and every set of circumstances is different either....but it does help to know that we are not alone and that what our children are feeling, and expressing is normal and we "are not nuts". We are not drowning, we just need a little help and encouragement, a little bolster or life-vest in this vast dark ocean that can go from calm to tempest in the blink of an eye.